Facebook May Be Changing Your Timeline: Redesign Tests in Progress

ABC News(NEW YORK) — Facebook may have given us a peek at the future of Timeline after a new design was rolled out for one of ABC News’ producers Wednesday. Apparently Facebook is experimenting with new ways of laying out user’s pages.

Facebook confirmed Thursday that it’s trying some new things. “This is a new design Facebook is testing with a small percentage of people to make navigating timeline even easier,” a Facebook spokesperson told ABC News.

So what might be coming? Here’s what we saw:

Tabs are back with one new look, doing away with front-and-center thumbnails for “friends” and “photos,” a move that may further bury some marketing efforts for brands that rely on apps. The result is a cleaner, bolder menu for navigation.

In the new design, users looking for “about” information on a profile page will not have to click to a new page with a new address. They can stay on the profile page they are browsing. Scroll down past the “about” information and a “friends” list will pop up. Keep scrolling and “photos” become available as well.

A “subscriber” page now shows the precise number of followers; up to now, if someone had 180,023 subscribers, it would be shortened to “180K.” The word “subscribers” has also been replaced by “followers,” something Facebook already confirmed it was planning to change.

Browsing through Timeline currently, you have to dart back and forth, left and right, to see posts chronologically. In this design, Facebook returns to a single stream of posts on the left, with friend/photo information to the right. The right hand stream eventually ends, leaving the single stream on its own. This would make it much easier to see one’s chronological stream.

Pressing the “star” on an image within the Timeline did not make the image come up full-screen. Perhaps that’s an unfinished feature.

On Thursday, without notice the profile reverted to normal, but there’s no public timeline saying how much longer normal will be, well, “normal” on Facebook.